Retiring, clearing an office of years of accumulation may be bittersweet, but it often yields unexpected treasures.

I have noted in an earlier post the letter I received from my high school teacher, Mr. Takacs. (Actually, it was a letter from me to me!)

The other day, to my surprise, I came across an essay my mother, Louise Copeland, wrote.

The paper is not dated, nor is there any indication of where it might have been published—if it was published.

Mother’s essay

Why surprise?

Well, I never “knew” my mother as a writer. Of course, my father was a professor and a scholar. He wrote books, delivered sermons, and earned fellowships.

But my mother was “just” a mother to me.

Of course, she was so much more, but for some reason it wasn’t until later that I learned to recognize that she had a life beyond mothering, beyond me.

She was herself a scholar. When she met my father, she was studying to become a single missionary, hoping to be dispatched to a country where she could use the rudimentary Spanish she had acquired during her childhood in Oklahoma.

She set her aspirations aside when she married my father and joined her dreams to his. Together they studied Japanese and in the late 1940s headed to Japan as missionaries. My father was duly employed, my mother remained at home with their two daughters, adding two more daughters to their family during the years they were in Japan.

Louise Copeland during her first term as a missionary in Japan.

Growing up in Wake Forest, NC, I remember she worked for a time as a teacher’s aide. Later she ran her own nursery school and kindergarten in the second floor of our big house on South Main Street.

Later, at the age of forty-four, with her now five children either all in school or out of the house, Mother decided to return to university to earn an advanced degree in social work.

In fact, she had been something of a social worker for years, volunteering to help others in our small town: young women escaping abusive situations, parents struggling with poverty, students dealing with mental health issues. She was innately gifted in helping others.

Mother secured admission to the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina, and then sought a house for our family in the Raleigh area, where it would be easier for her to commute to Chapel Hill.

Mrs. Copeland’s Nursery

Two years later, in 1969, after managing the move with two children in elementary school and a third in high school, a husband with a demanding career, and a rigorous program of study at one of the top-ranked schools of social work in the nation, she successfully earned her MSW and began working at John Umstead Hospital in Butner, NC.

Even then, I never recognized her as the competent career woman that she was.

The essay that I discovered in my campus files?

“The Impact of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States on Protestant World Missions”

The pages are yellowed now, and double-spaced. Mother clearly wrote the essay on a typewriter. She did not come to use a word processor until much later in life, and even then she preferred the typewriter.

What comes to your mind when you hear the term women’s liberation movement? E.R.A., equal employment opportunities for women, N.O.W., sexual promiscuity, militant females who try to dominate men, the right to abortion, day care centers for the children of working mothers, struggle against sexism in society, consciousness raising groups, rape crisis centers, women who reject childbirth and marriage, women’s rights, belief in the worth of women. All of these, and many more concepts, are a part of the modern women’s liberation movement in the U.S. This indicates the complexity and diversity of the movement. Because the more radical elements of the movement have gained much publicity in the media, this is all the more confusing to the average person and gives rise to many misconceptions and often total misunderstanding of the women’s movement.

She opens the essay with this compelling list of ways the women’s movement has been characterized over the years.

A few sentences later, the author (Mother) gives her purpose for writing:

It is the author’s conviction that the women’s liberation movement in its historical progression has indeed profoundly influenced the course of world missions! It will be the purpose of this paper to clarify the issues of the woman’s liberation movement and to show how this movement gave impetus and support to the movement of women into world missions.

The essay that follows is carefully presented and convincingly argued. The author begins with a historical overview of the secular efforts to advocate for equal rights for women before shifting to the history of women’s roles in Protestant missions:

Unlike the Catholic workers, the Protestant boards insisted from the beginning that a missionary must be married. Thus women went to the mission field—not for the contribution she might make, but as a help-meet and companion for her husband. As Dr. Anderson of the American Board expressed it, “In a word, woman was made for man, and as a general thing man cannot long be placed where he can do without her assistance.” Although the wife seemed to be indispensable, she was not appointed and received little recognition. These early wives made homes in an alien environment, had many children, and yet, somehow, found the time and energy to carry on a very effective work for women and children. [Here and throughout the essay she cites from R. Pierce Beaver, All Loves Excelling, 1968. Another source she consults is Barbara J. Harris, Beyond her Sphere: Women and the Professions in American History, 1978.]

Whereas her prose is measured, I can sense my mother’s own frustrations hovering between the lines.

My mother (center) with other missionary women during her second term in Japan.

As a married woman missionary, she had to struggle to secure her own appointment with the Board. She also had to fight to find her place in the field—especially during my parents’ second appointment (1975-1980). By then she was a professional social worker, a woman with her own career. But she gave that up when she accompanied my father on their return to the missions in Japan. He was the chancellor of a university. She was his wife.

By 1900 there were 41 women’s boards in the U.S. and 7 in Canada. In 1882 sixteen women’s societies reported total receipts of almost six million dollars. By 1882, in the few years of their existence, the women’s societies had sent out and supported 694 unmarried missionaries, maintained hundreds of national workers, built residences, schools, hospitals, and had made women a major force in world missions!

What was the reaction of the men to this wonderful new development? They were horrified! The early annals of the societies are filled with stories of opposition and often ”fear that this missionary effort primarily masked the women’s suffrage and Women’s Rights movement.” One man wrote, “The Cross of Christ is today prostituted to the unholy work of degrading, coarsening the fine tone of female character in our churches and in our country.” Dr. Beaver sums up their reaction in this way: “The church has always been the bastion of male arrogance and power, the men were most reluctant to share control and ministry with the ladies.”

As her essay continues, the author enumerates some of the remarkable contributions women made through their mission work. For example, in 1902 Dr. Ida. S. Scudder (1870-1960) founded a hospital in Vellore, India to specialize in care for women. Today that hospital is the largest Christian hospital in the world, with 2000 beds, and its medical school is now one of the premier medical colleges in India.

Money, apparently, was behind some of the grievances men had with women-run mission boards.

The men were irked because the women’s boards could operate on “shoestring budgets” due to the fact that almost all of the board officers, even secretaries, were unpaid volunteers and the single women missionaries lived on subsistence salaries, which families could not do. So it seemed the women always had money while the general boards suffered for funds. Some said separate boards threw the mission work out of balance. Others felt the church lost what the women gained. . . . Perhaps most frustrating for the denominational leaders was the fact that they had no control over the large funds collected by the women.

As the essay nears its conclusion, the author brings the discussion up to the present time, noting the efforts and great strides of women like Betty Friedan.

Since the underlying assumptions of the women’s rights movement—equality of all people as created by God and the worth and dignity of each person, male or female—are basically Christian values, what should be the church’s attitude toward the movement? Should not the church assume a leadership role in this movement to liberate women? Or has the church become the last bastion of male supremacy?

My mother must have known the answer, but by posing the question, she gestures towards optimism.

The shape and form of women’s future contribution is still unknown and a matter of speculation, but two things are certain: women will not long continue to tolerate sexist practices which shut them out of full participation; nor can the church and society afford to lose the creative gifts of women.

I remember when I wrote my second monograph, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan, I was thrilled to discover my father’s 1949 doctoral dissertation, “The Crisis of Protestant Missions in Japan, 1889-1900.” His study helped me gain perspective on the kinds of mission-influenced schools attended by many of the writers I discussed. I was proud to cite his work in my study.

Now that I have read through my mother’s essay though, I realize that perhaps SHE was the parent who influenced me more.

My mother was a feminist.

She was also shy and soft-spoken.

She never pushed herself forward, preferring to stay on the side serving tea and cake as my father regaled us at the dinner table with his stories.

I still wonder how it was that I had her essay in my files.

It was there amongst the notes and offprints I collected when I was working on Wakamatsu Shizuko, the writer and translator raised by American missionaries in Yokohama.

Based on the size of the paper—A-4—I assume she typed it while in Japan, where A-4 is standard. Also, because one of the sources she cites was published in 1978, she must have written the essay in or around 1980, just before she and my father resigned from their second appointment as missionaries to Japan.

Perhaps she sent it to me when she learned of my own interests in the important encounters between Japanese women writers and American missionaries.

In 2014 I published a chapter on Wakamatsu Shizuko and Mary Kidder in Divine Domesticities Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly. My mother did not live to see this publication, but it is based on a paper I delivered at a conference in Australia in 2012. Surely I spoke to her about my work.

After all, I had been working on Wakamatsu Shizuko for years by then.

And Mother read everything I ever wrote.

Mother at the cabin in Tennessee, reading a essay I wrote.

Even so, I don’t think I ever read her essay. I filed it away and forgot about it.

Until now.

For all my focus on the women’s voice in literature and culture, I seemed to have overlooked my own mother’s.

My friend, Jan Bardsley reminds me that I’m not alone in this oversight.

She directs me to a scene from Ariyoshi Sawako’s 1959 family saga, The River Ki.

Hana, the proper matriarch, locks her rebellious daughter, Fumio, in the family storehouse to punish her for the unladylike behavior of riding a bicycle. Fumio has made it no secret that she despises her mother’s old-fashioned willingness to sacrifice all for her husband and family. In the storehouse she discovers, to her surprise, that her mother has saved all the magazines she once treasured: feminist publications, each and everyone.

Hana was a feminist.

And so was my mother.

Her name was Louise Copeland. She was a missionary, a social worker, and a writer.